On a fateful Thursday, November 21, 1985, South Africa witnessed one of the brutal massacres that decorated the being of a country called South Africa, in a township called Mamelodi. Then a nest of political activism that could have been the birthplace of the South African Youth Congress, which was launched in the Eastern Cape after a tip- off to the security police that Mamelodi was a designated birthplace, Mamelodi became a scene of an obscene massacre.
The massacre happened on the day a march organised by the Mamelodi Parents Association, led by Louis Khumalo, a local pharmacist, to protest the rising municipal rent, presence of the police and army in Mamelodi, restrictions placed on attendance of funerals, and all other conditions associated the then State of Emergency. The march was in the main by parents, 'children' were asked not to join the march as this would have irked the then Minister of Law and Order, Mr Louis le Granje. Le Granje was one of the ministers who has the best of South African youth activism and the sharp end of ANC President's call to render the apartheid state ungovernable, and replace it with organs of people's power.
The 21 November march, interestingly led by a pharmacist that lived less than 800 meters away from the Mayor the march was also directed at, would define South African politics differently as it was at the march where one of the rarest moments occurred, the ANC and SACP flags were brandied about. It was at the march that Mamelodi as a nest of MK underground activities would find expression through how those operatives worked to avert a worse situation in terms of the numbers that died. The logistics that undergirded the march, the near military precision that managed rescue efforts, and the unreported return of gun fire that forced a retreat by an advancing Le Granjeist police violence intensified the community's belief that indeed a liberation struggle was being pursued.
Human accounts of and about the march also indicated that the police, in the main black police persons that were deployed, were collaborating with the marchers in a way that might have been interpreted to mean, they were not going to shoot the elderly who resembled their parents. Police were assisting the marshals to create order as people were marching, some leaders of the march en route were seen using the loud hailers of the police, such was the making of a revolution with the collusion of justice seeking law enforcement officers.
As the marchers reached the Municipal Offices, where Mr Bennett Ndlazi, the then Mayor of Mamelodi, a position representing the rejected Black Local Authorities system, a construct within the separate development paradigm paraded as not being apartheid, the police and army were ready to crush the spirit of the march. The normal time given to marchers to disperse was announced and officially 13 people, including a child, were killed.
Amongst those killed was my high school class mate, and first team soft ball captain Moses Motsei. A somewhat 'soft ball player' flamboyant fellow, who often dressed in 'sock-showing' trousers we dubbed 'mahenke' with big belts and generally always polished shoes. He was in a cohort of school mates that would always look like a group of not more than fifteen guys with a common interest of 'soft-ball' based stand-up comedy. Unassuming and yet leadership to those around him Mosss Motsei remains the most personal of losses I could claim of the massacre, over and above having lost other 13 South Africans to a brutal system.
At the time the march occurred, I was at the Transvaal College of Education, and swallowed into the SOREA scheme of events, as part of the AZASO and SRC campus leadership. Our relationship with the event were telephonic accounts from parent, and eyewitness accounts from Mamelodi comrades as we came home in the weekend to establish a relationship with the aftermath of the march.
The massacre, though historical in its character, and recognised through the entombment of its victims at the Freedom Park, and thus memorialised as part of South Africa's liberation heritage, has not received a local monument to amplify its local significance to Mamelodi. It is a striking coincidence that in the proximate week that Mamelodi commemorates its most towering historical moment in the liberation struggle, the Mamelodi Sundowns Women Club which became the first ever African Club to qualify for the Women Club World Cup has registered a second win of the same competition. They are now two times champions of Africa, and joining their male counterparts who are the inaugural Africa Football League Champions.
In heritage and memorialisation of society, the massacre, notwithstanding the pain it still evokes to some, the gladiatorial performance of the Mamelodi Sundowns Women Club calls into the silent chambers of just being Mamelodian, and by extension Tshwanian, a need to be louder with such heritage matters. We need to memorialise such feats into packets of our history tradable in the heritage wealth that Mamelodi and South Africa has. The greatest of tributes to the Mamelodi 21 November 13 should have been included in the development of the two Malls around the scene of the Massacre. As the coalition talks end, the Thinc Foundation will be making an approach to the New Mayor to facilitate the memorialisation of Mamelodi better that tavern talks, but with infrastructure expressionism seen in comparable conurbations in the world
Let the spirit of Moses Motsei, and others hegemonize our heritage. Mamelodi has a Biography.
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